The Relevancy of Diminished Responsibility
Diminished Responsibility (In the USA it is called Diminished
Capacity) is used to reduce the charge of Murder to Manslaughter thus
allowing the judge more discretion in sentencing. To many the idea of
a person having diminished responsibility to a crime is a problem at
an emotional and rational level : after all we often do not agree what
the mind is !
Some see the defence as a conspiracy of the legal and medical
professions to release increasingly guilty offenders into the
community and that this conspiracy is driven by money and socialists.
Victims and their relatives certainly take a dim view of the mental
defences and see society in terms of becoming increasingly lawless and
heading for Armageddon . Philosophers and theologians point out that
we really know very little about anything, and what is truth anyway ?
Moore in Act and crime discusses the connection of Volition and Act
and whether in fact volitions are an essential source of action . " If
however, volition is taken to refer to a faculty of will that as an
object causes bodily movements, then we must think that person
possesses a kind of unique causal power." 1 That is, is there a sort
of desire or wish? However there is the problem of whether volition is
an active state in the mind or whether it is a mental state, like a
thought , that just comes to one. Moore puts it as "Volitions are
simply the last executors both of our more general intentions and of
the background states of desire and belief that those more general
intentions themselves execute." 2 . This does not consider the
connections between the object of the v...
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...rsation with Dr John Mendenhall, MD ( via e-mail )
Psychiatric Association of Great Falls 2800 11th Ave South #23 Great
Falls, MT 59404
8 Victorian Law Reform Commission (Australia) , Report No 34
9 Draft of the Criminal law Consolidation ( Mental Impairment )
Amendment Bill (No 1) 1994 . South Australian State Government .
10 Ibid No 53
11 CampbellD T , " Mental Health Law: Institutionalised Discrimination
" Australian and New ZealandJournal of Psychiatry 1994 ,Vol 28, No 4
P554
12 Roseman S, "Mental Health Law : an idea whose time has passed "
Australian and New Zealand Journal of Psychiatry 1994 Vol 28, No4 P
560
13 Weinstock R , " Retention of Imperfect Self- Defense In California
Diminished Capacity despite Elimination of Diminished Capacty "
Newsletter AAPL , Vol 19 No3 , December 1994 p57
The New York Times bestseller book titled Reasonable Doubts: The Criminal Justice System and the O.J. Simpson Case examines the O.J. Simpson criminal trial of the mid-1990s. The author, Alan M. Dershowitz, relates the Simpson case to the broad functions and perspectives of the American criminal justice system as a whole. A Harvard law school teacher at the time and one of the most renowned legal minds in the country, Dershowitz served as one of O.J. Simpson’s twelve defense lawyers during the trial. Dershowitz utilizes the Simpson case to illustrate how today’s criminal justice system operates and relates it to the misperceptions of the public. Many outside spectators of the case firmly believed that Simpson committed the crimes for which he was charged for. Therefore, much of the public was simply dumbfounded when Simpson was acquitted. Dershowitz attempts to explain why the jury acquitted Simpson by examining the entire American criminal justice system as a whole.
In 1992, Cameron Todd Willingham was convicted of arson murder, where a fire that was presumably started by him, killed his three children, and in 2004 he was put to death. Later, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, established in 2005, found that none of the evidence used while prosecuting Mr. Willingham was valid, and that the fire was in fact, accidental. Unfortunately, many cases like this have occurred in our nation’s history, where human error was to blame for convicting an innocent person. The American Justice system will only be as accurate as the science and technology that we have in place to remove human error during the process. The movie The Wrong Man is a perfect example of human error in the justice system convicting an innocent
With the field of philosophy, the concept of "desert" suggests the status of deserving a particular response based upon prior action. The term is often invoked within conversations dealing with blame and justice. However, philosophers disagree on whether desert justifies responsive behaviors such as punishment or revenge. This debate is particularly significantly within the context of a legal system that purports to punish criminals in a manner that is consistent with their crimes.
The American people rely on the justice system set up by our founding fathers to uphold certain standards of fairness and equality. Society is brainwashed into believing that the justice system is to flaw and bad people are supposed to go to jail. However, this has not been the case for many years due to corruption in the Supreme Court followed by the Federal Courts and other inferior state courts. The American justice system has taken on a life of its own, following theories of fairness that are no longer connected to the needs of a free society. Instead of a justice system that weeds out the good from the evil, power has been given to the prosecutors, finding a good lawyer is harder than it seems, and rules have become unconstitutional.
Renner, T., Feldman, R., Majors, M., Morrissey, J., & Mae, L. (2011). States of Consciousness. Psychsmart (pp. 99-107). New York: McGraw-Hill.
According to Hutchison (2015), “Cognition can be defined as our conscious or preconscious thinking processes-the mental activities of which we are
Mental health is defined as "A state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, and not merely the absence of disease" (World health organization [WHO], 2012, p.3). Mental illness refers to health conditions or disorders which are characterized by alterations in thinking, mood, and behaviors, and may affect a person’s ability to fully function on a daily basic (Healthy people 2020).
Explain sentencing and the theories behind it. Include the sentencing models and how they are supposed to work.
Mental health is much more complex than only the absence of a mental illness. There are various definitions of what constitutes mental health. Mental health can be defined as a state in which an individual is able to adjust in the circumstances that they find themselves with the recurrent stresses of everyday living in an acceptable way (Williams. L & Wi...
a natural periodic state of rest for the mind and body, in which the eyes usually close and consciousness is completely or partially lost, so that there is a decrease in bodily movement and responsiveness to external stimuli. During sleep the brain in humans and other mammals undergoes a characteristic cycle of brain-wave activity that includes intervals of dreaming (The Free Dictionary by Farlax, 2002).
Mental health is defined as a state of well-being in which each person is able to comprehend his or her own potential, manage the normal stresses of life, work effectively, and have an involvement in the community. A mentally healthy human being is in touch with reality, can identify with other people and adapt well to situations in their environment, and can solve conflicts. Mentally healthy folks have psychobiological elasticity. Mental illnesses usually have definable diagnoses. The person who experiences a psychiatric or mental illness has lost the skill to act in response to their surroundings in ways that are in agreement with self or with the expectations of the world. Mental illness is categorized by thoughts and behaviors that
The Limitations of Reason Exposed in Crime and Punishment Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment illustrates an important idea. The idea is that "reason," that grand and uniquely human power, is limited in reach and scope. Social critic Friedrich August von Hayek commented once that, ". it may be that the most difficult task for human reason is to comprehend its own limitations.
A defence in criminal law arises when conditions exist to negate specific elements of the crime: the actus reus when actions are involuntary, the mens rea when the defendant is unaware of the significance of their conduct, or both. These defences will mitigate or eliminate liability from a criminal offence. Insanity, automatism and diminished responsibility are examples of said defences. They each share characteristics but can be distinguished in their scope and application.
Other than drugs, peer pressure etc. In the article., “Criminal Parental Responsibility: Blaming parents on the basis of their duty to morally education their children by Leonie Le Sage and Dorret DE Ruyter” it talks about how several states across the US and Europe that will punish parents and should be held responsible for the crime that was made by the juvenile, but its whether or not if they have the duty to control or their children. It also states: “There is a widespread belief that inadequate children by parents is one of the cause of juvenile delinquency.” After reading that and the rest of the article, it got me thinking that can lack parental guidance can be the main reason behind juvenile delinquency. Like a child behavior will have
they? - do two wrongs make a right?) but why is it so important that